Top 60 Naveen Jain Quotes

Philanthropy without scale and sustainability is like any other bad business that will simply wither and die on the vine.

Today, people idolize athletes and celebrities – and yes, highly successful and visionary business people like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, but not the innovators who perhaps have not seen such high-flying levels of success. Can anyone name the inventors of GPS, which has such a huge impact on our lives today?

In my view, the first requirement for success for an entrepreneur is to dream big. The second aspect that prevents entrepreneurs from succeeding is fear of failure.

I’m very, very used to hearing no – repeatedly! – and through my experience founding startups, I’ve learned to view those two little letters not as a final roadblock but as a problem to be solved.

In the business world today, failure is apparently not an option. We need to change this attitude toward failure – and celebrate the idea that only by falling on our collective business faces do we learn enough to succeed down the road.

There are as many ways to help another human being as there are people in need of help. For some, the urgent need is as basic as food and water. For others, it is an opportunity to develop a talent, realize an idea, and reach one’s full potential.

If we want to impact hundreds – or millions – of people, we have to do things differently. If we look at the problem as an infrastructural problem, we cannot make an impact because it requires a lot of effort. But when we convert this problem into a knowledge problem, suddenly the problem is manageable.

Education should not be about building more schools and maintaining a system that dates back to the Industrial Revolution. We can achieve so much more, at unmatched scale with software and interactive learning.

Success doesn’t necessarily come from breakthrough innovation but from flawless execution. A great strategy alone won’t win a game or a battle; the win comes from basic blocking and tackling.

If you create great opportunities, people around the world will come support your dream.

Success is not about how much money we have in the bank, but it’s about how many peoples’ lives we have impacted through it. Success is experienced when we do things which are never done before.

The human brain works as a binary computer and can only analyze the exact information-based zeros and ones (or black and white). Our heart is more like a chemical computer that uses fuzzy logic to analyze information that can’t be easily defined in zeros and ones.

The U.S. has spent billions of dollars on educating and supporting teachers or developing curricula but no resources are applied to ‘improving the brain’ that a student brings to the classroom.

Helping people boost themselves out of poverty is the best way to make a lasting positive difference in a person’s life.

If there is one thing I have learned on this incredible journey we call life, it is this: the sign of a truly successful individual is humility.

I came to the United States in the early ’80s and was welcomed with open arms and given the opportunity to pursue my dreams. God has been very kind to us. My family and I are fortunate enough to be successful and we feel a tremendous responsibility and obligation to give back to our great country.

I am proud of my kids and happy to brag about their achievements. Their success has been an immense source of happiness for me.

When you’re starting a new business, you don’t need to know much about it. A lot of the work is blocking and tackling – it’s the same type of stuff no matter what sector you’re in.

If you don’t know much about the field, you’re able to ask a set of questions that an expert would never ask, and that allows you a very different thought process and a fresh approach.

There is no longer a doubt that women are just as competent as men. Gender differences are guided by nurture, as society treats boys and girls differently from an early age.

I worked for Microsoft until 1996, till I had a different angle to view life. I wanted to be an entrepreneur and control my own destiny.

Being a father has been, without a doubt, my greatest source of achievement, pride and inspiration. Fatherhood has taught me about unconditional love, reinforced the importance of giving back and taught me how to be a better person.

Philanthropists can learn important lessons from business entrepreneurs. They both spend their time solving problems. And to be successful, they both must overcome physical challenges and create self-sustaining operations. And ultimately, they must allow people to take action for their own benefit.

I’ve found that entrepreneurial success usually comes through great execution, simply by doing a superior job of doing the blocking and tackling.

Call it the Tiger Mom effect: In the business world today, failure is apparently not an option.

Successful entrepreneurs find the balance between listening to their inner voice and staying persistent in driving for success – because sometimes success is waiting right across from the transitional bump that’s disguised as failure.

The real metric of success isn’t the size of your bank account. It’s the number of lives in whom you might be able to make a positive difference.

As a child I experienced firsthand the severe effects of poverty and illiteracy, especially upon women and children. My parents taught me the importance of education and that it was a key to improving an individual’s life.

I may have managed to build a successful technology startup that had gone public by the time my three kids hit their 13th birthdays, but don’t think that bought my wife and me any special respect from our teenagers.

True philanthropy requires a disruptive mindset, innovative thinking and a philosophy driven by entrepreneurial insights and creative opportunities.

Athletes at all ages are bigger and stronger than ever before. And they are being encouraged – sometimes even incentivized, as we recently learned was the case on at least one National Football League team – to play to injure.

If you know you are giving your best effort, you’ll never have any reason for regrets.

How important is failure – yes, failure – to the health of a thriving, innovative business? So important that Ratan Tata, chairman of India’s largest corporation, gives an annual award to the employee who comes up with the best idea that failed.

What separates sports from entrepreneurism, however, is that in business we constantly have to overcome undefined and unpredictable challenges. Athletes train for specific events and conditions, whereas entrepreneurs generally have little idea what they will encounter along the way.

It’s really easy to create a $1 billion company – you just have to solve a $10 billion problem.

As a young boy growing up in rural India, most of what I knew of the world was what I could see around me. But each night, I would look at the Moon – it was impossibly far away, yet it held a special attraction because it allowed me to dream beyond my village and country, and think about the rest of the world and space.

My parents didn’t believe in luck. They believed in hard work and in preparing me to take advantage of opportunity. Like many parents, they taught me to be generous but never to depend on the generosity of others.

Open-source encyclopedias such as Wikipedia and search engines such as Google and Bing, which people can tap into anytime and anywhere via computers and smart phones, put a world of knowledge at our fingertips at a lower cost than ever before.

Humans have always used our intelligence and creativity to improve our existence. After all, we invented the wheel, discovered how to make fire, invented the printing press and found a vaccine for polio.

A person who sees a problem is a human being; a person who finds a solution is visionary; and the person who goes out and does something about it is an entrepreneur.

It is always great to see technology leaders like Ginni Rometty, Marissa Mayer, and Meg Whitman breaking through as a new generation of leaders.

Sometimes a faint voice based on instinct resonates far more strongly than overpowering logic.

Successful entrepreneurs always give 100% of their efforts to everything they do.

Technology itself is neither good nor bad. People are good or bad.

We, as entrepreneurs, can be held responsible for our actions every single day, not every election cycle.

Growing up in India, I knew all I needed to change the world was one good opportunity, and I prepared myself for it. When that opportunity came – in the form of the chance to earn an engineering degree – I was ready.

I’ve been an entrepreneur all my life, and my recent focus is on finding entrepreneurial solutions to address global challenges in healthcare and education.

I think it’s time we all agree that gender stereotypes are simply the confabulation of our own mind.

Great entrepreneurs focus intensely on an opportunity where others see nothing.

Neuroplasticity research showed that the brain changes its very structure with each different activity it performs, perfecting its circuits so it is better suited to the task at hand.

Entrepreneurial Philanthropy is not just a philosophy or a dream. It is a promise that philanthropy is at its best when it is founded on entrepreneurial zest and agility.